Lisbon's Batida Revolution

Andy Beta travels to the capital of Portugal to explore the frenetic electronic music style known as batida, which offers the city's downtrodden African-immigrant community a sound—and societal voice—of their own.

The air of Lisbon is a beguiling mix of jasmine, sea brine, exhaust smoke, burnt transmissions and sardines. Pedro Gomes, a native who runs the Príncipe Discos imprint, tells me I’m here in time for "Santos Populares," a time in June when the streets fill with fried fish, beer cups, and pop music. He tells me that producer Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom, rechristened this celebration Fish Fest, and the narrow sidewalks even remind me of fish scales, their flagstones worn smooth and gently undulating underfoot.

There’s something both familiar and foreign about Lisbon. Maybe it’s familiar because of the Ikea advertisements, or the Sofia Vergara posters, or the thump of “Drunk in Love” on the metro. But Lisbon still feels like pre-EU Europe: the public squares full of living statues, live bands, and breakdancers, the main thoroughfares not yet transitioned into chain stores. It also feels old. The place I stay at during my visit has foot-thick stone walls, a stone table, and a hearth—it's older than the United States of America herself.

It’s in part because of Portugal’s heritage that I find myself visiting Lisbon, to explore the strain of dance music that draws on such African rhythms as kuduro, zouk, batucada, kizomba, tarraxinha, and house, yet is often summarized in one word: batida, which roughly translates to “my beat” or “my crew’s style of beats.” It’s crafted by the African immigrants living in housing projects well outside of Lisbon proper, far from public transportation and easy access to the city center. It’s a sound that Pedro Gomes, Nelson Gomes (no relation), André Ferreira, Márcio Matos, and José Moura have begun pressing to record on their Príncipe Discos label, cautiously letting the wider world in to hear. To an outsider such as myself, beyond the African sources, batida has an aesthetic that also brings to mind reggaeton, grime, baile funk, and footwork, i.e., electronic dance music made on the cheap (usually with Fruity Loops) that is still very much for its own urban community. But batida is very much its own thing: pure, gritty, not-quite-assimilated.

“The Portuguese colonized Africa—Angola, Cape Verde, and Guinea-Bissau, mostly—for approximately 500 years, and we did horrendous things, as all colonizers do,” Pedro tells me while chain smoking one morning. “After Portugal’s Revolução dos Cravos [which overthrew the authoritarian Estado Novo regime in 1974], these people came to Lisbon looking for a different life. They were also escaping the Civil War in Angola, which was brutal.”

Pedro is a ravenous music fan, responsible for booking many American underground music acts in Portugal, ranging from Animal Collective and Gang Gang Dance to stranger folk like R. Stevie Moore and Ariel Pink. And while fado remains his country’s most recognized musical export, Pedro and Nelson knew there had to be more happening in their hometown. “We thought there had to be music that dealt with the rhythms, syncopations, harmonies, and melodies happening here and we'd just never heard it,” Pedro says. “We were looking for contemporary manifestations and evolutions of Angolan and Verdean music that reacted to being from there and now living here.”

They found it one night in 2007 at “one of those very charitable events where a cultural institution instigates that poor neighborhoods present their very best music,” according to Pedro. One act was forgettable, while another intriguingly sounded like Martin Hannett-produced zouk, while a third featured someone singing atop what Pedro describes as “a hyper-compressed, digital, incredibly precise, refined, brutal version of a funaná beat.” Nelson Gomes, in attendance with his girlfriend, realized that they had finally come into contact with this new sound and implored Pedro to come back the next night.

On the second night of the event, the young teen who had made this alien new beat was standing onstage. “We approached him afterwards, asking, ‘Did you make this?’” Pedro says about his first encounter with the producer DJ Marfox. “And he said, ‘Yeah.’ And we said, ‘OK, we gotta talk. Now.’”

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A2 “Zero”

Four years after Pedro and Nelson's first contact with the new sound of the Afro-Portuguese emigrant community, the first Príncipe Discos single emerged. It was a cautious and considered merger between native Portuguese culture and African emigrants who had been all but shut out of society geographically, culturally, and politically. “We had an understanding that it was the first time that this cultural divide was being bridged,” says Pedro. “Portugal media is a 100% white. There’s no black representation. Zero. They don't have a voice. There's not one black politician. There's not one black journalist.”

The native Portuguese enthusiasts had to convince DJ Marfox and the other young producers that were making music in their bedrooms to be played at neighborhood parties that they were for real and not out to steal this music or propagate it in a way that was beyond their control. Pedro and his colleagues realized the high stakes: “If we went about this the wrong way, we'd be basically producing cultural crime. If the music didn't keep its qualities intact, it would be colonized.”

DJ Marfox. Photo by André Príncipe.

To gauge the importance of DJ Marfox on this music, consider that his DJ name—combining his first name with his favorite Nintendo game as a 13-year-old, "Star Fox"—is influential enough that most of the DJs and producers on the scene have followed suit as tribute: DJ Nigga Fox, DJ Fofuxo, DJ Lilocox. He showed many young neighborhood kids a new path out of their otherwise perilous situation in Portugal. “If you're a ghetto kid, you have three or four shots in life,” Pedro says. “Either you're an incredible futbol player, you immigrate, you go work at KFC or Burger King, or you're a criminal, a drug dealer. That's it.”

I ask Pedro his estimation of Marfox’s importance on the future of Portuguese culture. With zero hyperbole, he replies: “They’re going to build a fucking statue of this guy.”

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A3 “Weed”

“We believed that music is nothing but organized noise," producer Hank Shocklee told Keyboard magazine in 1990, talking about the genesis of Public Enemy. "You can take anything—street sounds, talking, whatever you want—and make it music by organizing it. We took whatever was annoying, threw it into a pot, and that’s how we came out with this group.”

It lasts just over three minutes, but DJ Nigga Fox’s “Hwwambo” evokes that strategy. It sounds like someone making a house track with the park rather than the dancefloor in mind. There’s an openness and sense of space that feels mildly psychedelic—that moment when you’re high and every noise around you suddenly coheres into music. There are video game yips and adult voices talking, hand drums and claps, with plenty of space for the kids who can also be heard running around and yelling. There’s a melody that sounds like a gypsy song, which runs countercurrent to the African polyrhythms yet makes a strange sort of sense.

The next day, André Ferreira and Márcio Matos drive me 20 minutes outside of Lisbon’s city limits, towards a set of towers. I try to locate us on Google Maps but only a haze of orange appears. We sit out before a mural that features Bob Marley and Tupac in congress with a spliff between them. Someone has tagged tears on the latter’s face.

A compact car drives past and a 20-year-old producer under the name of DJ Puto Márcio emerges, wearing a Family Guy sweater with Brian Griffin’s face on it. His crew, Tia Maria Produções, released their first EP earlier this month. It's entitled Tá Tipo Já Não Vamos Morrer, which roughly translates as We Are Not Gonna Die No More. “When I was younger I danced at parties,” he tells me via translator, looking down at the ground. “In a courtyard, on the futbol field, on the street, or spaces on the floor of buildings—there was a PA and a DJ, and people would bring their own drinks and dance.”

He didn’t know that most of the beats propelling these parties came from Marfox, but once he “started consciously listening to Marfox,” he began making his own beats. There’s not much fame or money to be made as a new artist about to play his first DJ set at the Príncipe Discos night at a club called Musicbox, but for Márcio, it’s a glimmer of hope in a future that otherwise has few prospects. “I'm not really sure what else I could've done or can do now,” he says. “This was the best opportunity I had so far. Music leaves me more relaxed.”

From there, we drive to another bairro, one whose name translates as “Owl's Farm.” We wait around in the courtyard for the emergence of DJ Marfox, a stocky young man sporting a faux hawk, rosary, black jeans, and black Air Jordans. For a DJ who is serving as ambassador for this music around the world, including a gig this weekend at MoMA PS1 in New York City, Marfox still lives at home. He is also a consummate host, offering his guests slices of dense and sweet broas de mel as well as lambrusco. He goes into his room and comes out with a brick that he saved from the housing project he grew up in, one that was torn down due to urban renewal. He points to his name rendered in white paint, the first time he used “Marfox” as his tag.

Seated on his mother’s couch, I ask if he perceives his music as being political. He thinks that today’s rappers and producers in Portugal serve a function similar to the protest singers circa the Carnation Revolution. “It stands for the minority, it presents an attitude, a way of thinking and being,” he says via translation. “I don’t need to know the history of house and techno to make the music I make. I don’t need to study music technically to be able to do music. But society looks down on me for being black and doing kuduro music in the suburbs.”

He sees a cultural shift already happening in his adopted country. “The new Lisbon will be the periphery of the city, then they will be forced to acknowledge and represent us,” he says. “The dinosaurs, the old guard, are preventing this convergence from happening. But even dinosaurs die.”